Missed the TV moment everyone’s talking about? rocks out with the Rolling Stones and gets lost in the magical world of Roald Dahl

WHAT makes a Rolling Stone? Not moss, obviously. But in the mythology of the inadhesive rock ’n’ roll group, the key moment occurs at Dartford station in 1961, when a young Keith Richards spies Mick Jagger preening on the platform with his Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters albums under his arm.

In that moment, Jagger and Richards recognise each other as kindred spirits. No Dartford rendezvous, no Satisfaction, no Brown Sugar; and no Keith Richards as a kind of majestic Satan, a Methuselah who amazes by virtue of being alive and almost sentient. Richards, remember, was man for whom the term “elegantly wasted” was coined, though the elegance is harder to spot these days.

So it’s notable that Julien Temple’s biographical collage,

(BBC iPlayer) ends on the railway platform at Dartford, with the immortal pirate looking backwards. Just before the end titles, Richards notes that has known Jagger since he was four, “but we don’t talk about that a lot”.

What happens when you roll the Stones back up the hill? This is Temple, so what happens is a cut-and-pasting of found f o o t a ge , coalescing t o p ro d u c e a flickering image of Richards as a war baby who grew up playing in the bomb holes left by Luftwaffe pilots who lacked the mettle to keep on flying into London. “According to my mum,” says Richards, “the sirens were going off as I was emerging into the world.” He continues: “I have a complete hatred of Adolf Hitler because he dumped on my crib.”

The London stuff is familiar, and not just from Temple’s other films. Still, the det ails of Richards’s early life are fascinating. Has the guitarist moulded them to fit his own image? Probably, but that doesn’t make them wrong.

What made the Keith? A grandfather who was a pal of Keir Hardie and a grandmother who became mayor of Walthamstow on the Labour ticket. A father who played it straight as straight and a warbler for a mum. Saturday mornings down the Dartford Gaumont, watching Roy Rogers riding a beautiful palomino. He’s got guns and a guitar, says Keith, “and he whips everyone’s ass”.

And then the arrival of rock ’n’ roll and the rebellious schoolboy’s habit of wearing t wo pairs of strides — the drainpipes beneath the regulation bag gies for a quick change at the schoolday’s end. That’s Keith Richards’s version of what made Keith Richards, and he delivers it all from beneath a Rasta headband with his customary note of befuddlement. He looks and sounds shellshocked, but that’s a different, overfamiliar story. Meanwhile, in

(BBC iPlayer) the great, late writer was reflecting that a life is made up of “a great amount of small incidents, and a small amount of great ones”. In truth, Dahl’s biography is extraordinary, and has more great incidents than is the norm. Getting blown up on his first day of active service as a pilot in Libya was one such moment, and it’s fair to speculate that a neardeadly plane crash would do strange things to a chap.

Whether it changed Dahl’s internal wiring permanently is a matter of dispute, though he was surely right when he identified the importance to his art of remaining “an undeveloped adult”.

Perhaps that’s why he found inspiration in the language difficulties of his first wife after she suffered a stroke. In her jumbled diction, a dry martini became a red screwdriver, and the creative vocabulary of the BFG was born.